Cannanland Squatter Camp, Ferreraisdorp, Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa

The ‘Children Growing up in Cities Project” was a research study funded by UNESCO, which extended work undertaken in the 1960s by MIT planner Kevin Lynch looking at how children in urban informal settlements perceive the city.

Peter Rich was a co-director of the South African study group assigned to work on The Cannanland Inner City squatter settlement in central Johannesburg .

The first stage of the project was to undertake a detailed measured survey of Cannanland and later a portion of Thula Mntwana. Following this, participatory projects were instigated engaging 8 to 14 year old children to ascertain how on a micro and macro scale the environment might be improved. The community was then forcibly removed from their homes and dumped on land 38 kilometers outside Johannesburg in the Thula Mntwana Township, on gridded government plots with limited service provision. This led to the design and construction of a Children’s centre in Thula Mntwana.

Awards

• EDRA Place Award, International Research Awarded in collaboration with MIT for the 10 City teams of the ‘Children Growing up in Cities Project’.